Norway seems to be a land of villages, with a people not yet enlarged and awakened from stifling bigotry.  Its social organization still presses painfully on those who wish to do their own thinking; and half a century ago in Ibsen’s impressionable youth, the pressure must have been tragic.  There is no call for wonder that he should have reacted violently against these fettering restrictions.  There is no need to speculate on the reasons why he has failed to feel the extraordinary delicacy of the problem of the equilibrium between the opposing forces, which have a cramping socialism on the one side and an exuberant anarchy on the other.  His choice was swift and he exerted his strength unhesitatingly against the chains which had clanked on his limbs in his early manhood.  He knew only too well and by bitter experience the hardness of the crust that encased the Norwegian community and he felt the need of blows still harder to break thru and let in a little light.  And this is why he is so emphatic in his individualism; this is why he is so fiercely violent in his assertion of the right of every man to own himself and to obey his own will, contemptuous of the social bond which alone holds civilization together.

It is Boyesen, a fellow Norwegian and an ardent admirer of Ibsen’s, who has most clearly stated Ibsen’s position:  “He seems to be in ill humor with humanity and the plan of creation in general (if, indeed, he recognized such a plan), and he devotes himself, with ruthless satisfaction, to showing what a paltry contemptible lot men are, and how aimless, futile, and irrational their existence is on this earth, with its chaotic strivings and bewildered endeavors.” ...  “Furthermore, he utterly undervalues what we call civilization, which he regards primarily as an ignominious compromise—­a surrender and curtailment of our natural rights and liberties, in return for a paltry security for life and limb.” ...  “He has apparently no appreciation of the tremendous struggle, the immense suffering, the deluge of blood and tears, it has cost to redeem the world from that predatory liberty which he admires, and to build up gradually the safeguards of organized society which he so detests.”

In other words, Ibsen is not what is called “an advanced thinker”; he is really the most extreme of reactionaries, because he wants to go back to the beginnings of civilization.  He is willing to give up the chronometer and to return to the sun-dial.

It would be unfair, of course, to sustain what is here alleged by quoting speeches from his plays, since Ibsen is too completely a dramatist to use any one character merely as a mask thru the mouth of which he might voice his private opinion.  But when we consider the whole group of the social dramas and when we disengage the philosophy underlying them and sustaining them, we may venture to deduce the private opinion of the author.  And in his letters to Georg Brandes we find this opinion fearlessly exprest: